Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

Exhaustion and adrenaline, whiskey and memory whip Georgie back and forth between silent stupor and desperate outbursts. By deep into the evening he doesn’t really know anymore who he is or where he is or how he got there; every once in a while he’s aware of a naked woman presenting herself to his inspection but not his touch. The dream of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel is far away. Girls keep putting shots of liquor in front of him as he babbles; sitting at the stage he’s just sober enough to understand that when the girls dance the other men give them money. Two or three times Georgie actually searches his own pocket as though he’s going to find something to offer.

This has been going on for a while when he feels a drop on his chest.

He looks up at the ceiling. “There’s a leak,” he mutters to no one. He momentarily grabs one of the girls by the wrist: “Got a leak up there,” he slurs, staring into the dark above him. The girl thinks it means he’s got to piss. He keeps running his hand across his belly and his chest to wipe something away but nothing’s there, even though he feels the drops. He moves to another seat, but wherever he moves he feels something dripping, and the more he wipes his hands over his body the more frustrated he becomes to find nothing, not water or whiskey or blood, just drip drip drip. He cannot, in the dark of the Fleurs d’X, see the drops falling from the mouth of the woman with the head of a bird on his chest.

He feels the shudder in his shoulders of wings trying to break free, flapping.

There, at the side of the stage, a vision rises from the dark before him.

She rises from the dark on the other side of the stage, head first into the light until the light holds all of her, from the gold of her hair to the black stockings of her long legs; and Georgie knows that though she’s not the Queen of Wands, she is the Woman in the Dark. If he were either a little less drunk or a little more he might reach out to fill one hand with one breast so as to measure it against the memory of room twenty-eight at the Crystal Hotel, what remnants of its memory remain. He would have her say the word America to see if it matches memory’s echo, faint as it may now be. In the light she smiles at him like a child. None of the others have smiled like this. He’s too naïve to understand that they haven’t smiled because he has no money and they’re waiting for him to intoxicate himself into oblivion, all he knows is that the Woman in the Dark is smiling at him and, for the first time in so long, nothing seems quite as hopeless. She’s pure white and gold. There’s not the flicker of blackness across her face. In the light she consumes his existence and leaves only the trace of his relief; he settles into a rapturous peace.

But something is happening in his shoulders. Something is happening on his chest. Somewhere in time a trolley disappears and an obelisk moves several feet; on a back alley official graffiti gives way to heresy written on a slab of Wall into which messages disappear one by one. Something is unraveling memory by memory, not only the memories of the moment but of the moments to come and the moments that have already come.

And for a moment, while there’s still time, Georgie returns to his rapture. Shamed by her smile, shamed by his poverty, he places the piece of the Wall at her feet, the only thing he has to offer, entirely confident it must mean as much to her as it does to him. When the dance is over she picks up the stone and looks at it: there’s something written, Georgie almost says to her, when she thanks him and disappears before he has the chance.

Raising his hands to his chest, he begins to scratch.

MANY YEARS LATER, WATCHING the new girl audition, Dee had completely forgotten the strange young man with the tattoos. But she did remember Wade, who thought he had come to the Fleurs d’X looking for a dead body and turned out to be looking for another kind of body altogether. Dee may not have remembered the first time Wade talked to Mona but she remembered the second, when he waited hours for her and kept throwing men out of their chairs, and she remembered the time he tore off his clothes and mauled one of the other customers who had shown too much interest in her, or perhaps it was that she had shown too much interest in him. At any rate, that was the night Mona disappeared forever, and the last time Dee ever saw Wade in the Fleurs d’X, though like everyone she’d heard the stories about the naked giant who wandered the Arboretum year after year searching for his lost dancer. And so from time to time she had occasion to be reminded of Wade even as the boy with the tattoos was blotted from memory within twenty-four hours of the cops’ dragging from the back room his shredded corpse.

Halfway through the third and climactic part of the routine, the new girl auditioning for Dee finally balked. She froze midmusic and scooped up her clothes and rushed from the stage, standing off to the side of the club now, probably feeling like a fool. Oh God, don’t start crying on me, Dee thought to herself, watching the dim form of the girl struggling in the shadows to regain composure. This was why Dee held auditions in the slow hours, when it was less overwhelming and the customers were at their least demanding; she wasn’t surprised about this one, sharing the men’s disappointment and the other dancers’ relief, because this particular girl was the most beautiful to walk into the club for as long as Dee could remember, which was one of the things that had gotten Dee to remembering Mona and Wade. Beautiful girls often failed auditions because they weren’t damaged enough or not damaged in the right way or too damaged in the wrong way, or not so innocent of damage they’d take off their clothes in the street for the fun of it, if fun were legal.

The new girl reminded Dee of Mona for the way she was beautiful and of Wade for the way she was a glimpse of black. She pulled on her white dress and turned in the dark, walking past the stage toward the bar. “Sorry,” she muttered, half chastened and half defiant.

“Forget it,” Dee said. “Maybe you’re just not cut out for it. Why do you want to do this anyway?”

Once the sense of defeat passed, the girl didn’t really look too crestfallen: damaged in the wrong way, Dee concluded. The girl’s selfpossession, which had so dissolved in the glare of the stage light, slowly reasserted itself. She was tall and big-boned, gangly in her negotiations of light and shadow; stray genes wandered across her wild dark hair and liquid mouth, the blue in her eyes hijacked from some other eyes, the hair’s transient glint of gold that ran the border at midnight from another country into her own. Every head in the Fleurs d’X had turned when she walked in, which was something Dee hadn’t seen in a while; it took a lot to turn a man’s head in a room full of naked women, or maybe the point was it didn’t take much at all. The girl had been all bravado in the beginning, a little too much bravado in retrospect: she was accustomed to demanding the chance to prove herself. “I need the work,” the girl answered.

“Yes, well, everyone needs the work,” Dee said, “but people choose this kind of work for a reason. Maybe all your life you’ve been told you’re beautiful. Maybe it’s the only thing you know about yourself. But up there,” she pointed at the stage, “you either didn’t believe it or didn’t care, it wasn’t worth anything to you. Up there beautiful not only isn’t everything, it isn’t even the main thing.” Dee guessed the girl had just arrived in the city. “Where’s your family?”

“The theater,” she answered, “on the other side.”

“In the Arboretum?” For the first time tonight Dee was amazed, and in the Arboretum tonight was always a long time.